
Paul Banks Thompson- PH.D.
- Professor at Michigan State University
Paul Banks Thompson
- PH.D.
- Professor at Michigan State University
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343
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Introduction
I am continuing work on gene editing in crops and food animals, and undertaking a new project called "archetypes for future food systems".
Current institution
Publications
Publications (343)
Advanced biopreservation technologies using subzero approaches such as supercooling, partial freezing, and vitrification with reanimating techniques including nanoparticle infusion and laser rewarming are rapidly emerging as technologies with potential to radically disrupt biomedicine, research, aquaculture, and conservation. These technologies cou...
This article explores how time-related metaphors frame advanced cryopreservation technologies in environmental conservation. Cryopreservation “stops” or “freezes” biological time and “buys time” desperately needed to preserve species and ecosystems. We advance a framing of these technologies as logistical, highlighting how they create opportunities...
This article presents a framework of ethical analysis for anticipatory evaluation of advanced biopreservation technologies and employs the framework illustratively in three domains. The framework features four clusters of general ethical considerations: (1) Producing Benefits, Minimizing Harms, Balancing Benefits, Risk, and Costs; (2) Justice, Fair...
Biomedical research on advanced cryopreservation has spillover effects on innovation in the food and agricultural sector. Advanced biopreservation technology has three key domains of impact in the food system: (1) improving efficiencies in storage and utilization of gametes and organoids for plant and animal breeding; (2) isochoric methods for pres...
This chapter sets out some key features of an agriculturally based environmental utopia. In such a world, the production of food and fiber would be wholly consonant with resilient ecosystems, but the idea of a utopia implies more. Specifying the requirements for utopia is an inherently philosophical task, so criteria that emphasize resilient ecosys...
An inclusive and socially legitimate governance structure is absent to address concerns over new agricultural biotechnologies. Establishing an agricultural bioethics commission devoted to inclusive deliberation on ethics and governance in agricultural and food biotechnology is urgent. Highlighting the social and ethical dimensions of current agricu...
Thompson provides commentary and reaction to other chapters in the book. It is organized as sections identified by the names of chapter authors. Thompson responds to chapters advancing new ideas in agriculture by indicating how he understands the authors’ analysis with respect to his own work. Chapters that address more philosophical dimensions of...
Pragmatism provides not just a theoretical perspective on science and inquiry, but ways of being in the world, of knowing the reality we inhabit. Approaching this philosophical tradition as a diverse set of philosophies that it is, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Pragmatism introduces many of the ideas and debates at the centre of the field today.
Focus...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep...
This chapter begins by first providing an overview of the key concepts of ethics and common morality, then moves on to review common morality in agriculture and food systems. The chapter also highlights some of the topics involved agricultural ethics, before reviewing the various social science research methods currently involved in analysing relev...
Agricultural ethics deals with issues that arise in the production and distribution of food and fiber commodities. It includes both cultivation of plants and husbandry of livestock. Recent work touches on health and aesthetic issues in food consumption. Many topics of contemporary interest relate to industrial production methods that have emerged s...
There are now dozens of proposals for integrating ethics into the early planning and assessment of technological innovation. This paper tracks some of Larry Hickman's contributions to these trends. While Hickman's suggestions could be incorporated into virtually many of the new proposals for integrating ethics into technological research, developme...
Richard P. Haynes, founding editor of Agriculture and Human Values, was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida. His personal interests in the environmental dimensions of agriculture led him to found the journal in the 1980s with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Later in life, he published on eth...
A letter in Science arguing for a U.S. commission to discuss and review ethical issues in food and agricultural technology.
An early ethics assessment method was used to evaluate sustainability goals and early findings from an automated body scanning technology for swine production. The project had twin goals of discovering potential pitfalls in the technology and exploring the applicability of the method, derived from the Ethical Matrix, as a tool to aid researchers in...
The ethics of food production should include philosophical discussion of the condition or welfare of livestock, including for animals being raised in high volume, concentrated production systems (e.g. factory farms). Philosophers should aid producers and scientists in specifying conditions for improved welfare in these systems. An adequately non-id...
This chapter introduces the systems thinking approach to sustainability. We review alternative ways of defining or interpreting sustainability and discuss points on which people differ in their understanding of the concept. A systems approach implies that sustainability is not limited to environmental considerations and that environmental, economic...
The profitability of a business is used to model sustainability as a function of the relationship between revenue (or inflows) and expenses (or outflows). Profitability is a simple model for sustainability, but for individual businesses to remain profitable, they must be mindful of the socio-economic context in which they operate. This leads busine...
Pollution damage and resource depletion cause hardship, disease, and distress for human beings and other living things by threatening important ecosystem services. Limiting and reversing these damages is a key aim for sustainability. These goals are pursued by identifying environmental indicators that allow managers and policy makers to monitor the...
The 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the current generation while allowing future generations to meet their needs. Subsequent discussions of sustainability were deeply influenced by the theory of economic development and by the tools used to mea...
This book presents a systems thinking approach to sustainability by answering questions on the meaning of sustainability in business, ecology, environmental quality, and economic development. Systems approaches to social injustice are developed. The sustainability of governance processes and achieving larger sustainability goals requires integratin...
Science, education, religion, and the arts are mediums for discovery and dissemination about sustainability. Scientific methods and organization, in particular, have changed significantly as scientists work toward sustainability. These changes include the rise of interdisciplinary and participatory methods and the emergence of wicked problems as a...
The book concludes with a review of ways to conjoin humility and patience with systems thinking in the evaluation of day-to-day activities. Examples include household conservation activities and choosing consumable goods that pose less threat to ecological and social systems. We discuss the impact of purchasing products represented as environmental...
Ecologists deploy the systems concepts of stocks, flows, and feedbacks to develop models of population dynamics, predator-prey relationships, and the movement of abiotic components (energy, water, minerals) through ecosystems. These models are the basis for estimating the sustainability of ecosystem processes. Ecology emphasizes the organization of...
Ways of thinking about justice and its role in political ideology are described. Social justice is linked to views on access to and distribution of resources crucial for thriving societies. Ideas for connecting sustainability and social justice include environmental justice, food sovereignty, climate justice, and social sustainability. Principles o...
What governments can do to promote sustainability is limited by the systemic interactions that support government itself. The chapter places government action within a larger social system of governance. Economic injustice and political repression can weaken the sustainability of governance processes and limit governments' ability to deliver social...
The global food system exhibits dizzying complexity, with interaction among social, economic, biological, and technological factors. Opposition to the first generation of plants and animals transformed through rDNA-enabled gene transfer (so-called GMOs) has been a signature episode in resistance to the forces of industrialization and globalization...
Metaphysical claims assert categories and categorical systems for the broadest and most general characterizations of reality and experience. The chapter discusses the nature of metaphysical claims and the role of religious or theological doctrines in lending support to them. Early debates over gene technology emphasized metaphysical and religious t...
This chapter applies the ethics framework for evaluating emerging technology developed in Chaps. 1 and 2. It illustrates the application of a risk-based approach to the ethical analysis of agrifood technology by reviewing the policy debate in the United States over the first important product of agrifood biotechnology, recombinant bovine somatotrop...
The chapter introduces the analysis of socioeconomic impact from agrifood biotechnology through a review of the technology treadmill. In this model, farmers experience ethically significant harmful impacts, while secondary beneficial effects accrue to consumers (as well as technology developers). The chapter then reviews how these social impacts wo...
This chapter completes coverage of environmental risks begun in Chap. 6, which emphasized both the philosophical rationale for expected-value risk analysis, along with weaknesses in the way that approach has been applied to agrifood gene technology. This chapter discusses ethical objections to expected value analysis and takes up classical question...
This concluding chapter situates the previous 13 chapters in the book within themes in the philosophy of technology. I begin by asking how philosophy could contribute to the controversy over biotechnology, through critique and or defense of this new suite of tools and techniques. The chapter continues by discussing how two key themes in the book—th...
The chapter provides synoptic overviews on key developments in gene technology since publication of the 2nd edition in 2007. Synthetic biology is discussed briefly, and more attention is given to CRISPrCas9, and gene editing. Both techniques can increase the speed at which a new product would move through the R&D process, and both have the potentia...
This chapter addresses a series of philosophical questions that arise in a general consideration of food safety risks, with specific attention to products of gene transfer. The first topic is to demonstrate the sense in which modern technology has converted what were once norms of prudence and self-interest into ethical responsibilities. The next t...
Hans Jonas’ principle of responsibility establishes a basic framework for evaluating novel technology in ethical terms. Risk assessment provides a further development of Jonas’s framework as it is applied to agrifood biotechnology. A risk-based approach consists in distinguishing four tasks for implementing technological ethics: hazard identificati...
The public has working notions of heredity that permit functionally adequate judgment in most matters, but that differ from the perspective of molecular genetics in significant ways. Non-specialists also have limited knowledge of plant and animal breeding prior to the advent of recombinant DNA methods for gene transfer. Concerns about the “deficit...
This chapter completes the review of socioeconomic risks from food and agricultural gene technologies begun in Chap. 8. Here, the focus is on challenges to the claim that gene technologies make or will make substantial contributions to the welfare of poor and marginalized people, especially in the less industrialized regions of Africa, Asia and Lat...
This concluding chapter from previous editions makes recommendations that follow from the previous eleven chapters analyzing food safety, animal health, environmental and socioeconomic risks associated with agricultural and food biotechnology, as well as discussions of intellectual property rights and religious objections. Scientists and the biotec...
The chapter provides an analytic framework for applying classic philosophical theories of property and the distribution of property rights in the context of emerging technology. Instrumental theories of property view property as a convention that should be evaluated according to the purposes it serves. Ontological theories of property claim that ho...
In its most common form, environmental risk assessment is an adaptation of consequentialist ethical theory. Hazards are identified as significant through careful articulation of the values (axiology) that determine why outcomes are considered to be bad, harmful or adverse, and exposure quantification is used to characterize risk as an expected valu...
This chapter examines the ethical significance of gene technology on the health and well-being of livestock, poultry and any other animal species kept for agricultural purposes. Agricultural biotechnologies include drugs and feeds developed for use on livestock, as well as genetic transformations and cloning. Key applications are reviewed and examp...
Anyone who has maintained a sustained philosophical relationship with Don Ihde that includes face-to-face interaction has probably heard him acknowledge a pragmatist bent in his thought. In Experiential Phenomenology: Multistabilities, Ihde characterizes postphenomenology as “pragmatism + phenomenology”; he also provides a brief critical discussion...
This 3rd edition of Food and Agricultural Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective updates Thompson’s analysis to reflect the next generation of biotechnology, including synthetic biology, gene editing and gene drives. The first two editions of this book, published as Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective in 1997 and 2007, were the first comprehens...
Todd LeVasseur, Religious Agrarianism and the Return of Place: From Values to Practice in Sustainable Agriculture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017), xvi + 253 pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-4384-6772-6.
The Spirit of the Soil was updated for its 2nd edition in 2017. Three comments on the update are addressed here. First, productionism was not intended as a explanation of farm management decision making, but as a paradigm for agricultural science and a philosophy of food systems, as a whole. Second, linking cultural values in food systems could use...
This encyclopedia article includes a summary of work related to agriculture and farming from ethical theorists and a parallel section reviewing approaches focused on specific problems in the practice of agriculture.
Environmental philosophers in Europe and North America have gravitated toward an approach that emphasizes the scarcity of resources and the encroachment of civilization on spectacular natural landscapes. As a result, they have neglected philosophical sources within the European tradition that would start with agriculture as a locus for building con...
Bryan Norton takes the debate over weak and strong sustainability to characterize the key conceptual disagreement among attempts to elaborate a theoretical approach to sustainability. In contrast, I argue that this debate is mired within assumptions of economic development theory that fail to recognize how elements of fragility, stability, resilien...
This third edition of "Animal Welfare" has 407 pages and is divided into five parts. Part I, Issues, introduces the background and philosophy of the subject. Part II covers problems for animal welfare, starting in chapter 3 with the animal's interactions with its environment. The following four chapters use categories similar to the UK Farm Animal...
Food production can be viewed as one among many activities that produce goods in modern industrial societies, with ethical issues analogous to those of other sectors of the economy. Contrarily, agriculture and farming have historically been thought to have unique influence on the nature of social institutions, the reinforcement of moral virtues, an...
Ethics research queries the norms and values that shape the goals and justification for gene drive projects, and that might lead to issue or opposition to such projects. A framework for organizing ethics research is offered. In addition to basic research ethics and risk assessment, gene drives will give rise to questions about the fiduciary respons...
A slow but steady shift in perspective on the need to address ethical issues within the professional activity of animal scientists has been underway for almost twenty years. Increasingly the issue is less whether animal scientists should be discussing ethical issues in their classes, at their professional meetings and in their interactions with cli...
A slow but steady shift in perspective on the need to address ethical issues within the professional activity of animal scientists has been underway for almost twenty years. Increasingly the issue is less whether animal scientists should be discussing ethical issues in their classes, at their professional meetings and in their interactions with cli...
Uberveillance of humans will emerge through embedding chips within nonhumans in order to monitor humans. The case explored in this chapter involves the development of nanotechnology and biosensors for the real-time tracking of the identity, location, and properties of livestock in the U.S. agrifood system. The primary method for research on this ca...
As Paul Thompson points out in this introduction, when discussing governance and justice there is a tendency to emphasize government and de-emphasize non-state governance structures, even though these structures have profound, daily impact on our lives in many different ways.